


Faces

by soulshrapnel



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: (but no character death because we stop before that point), Canon Unhappy Ending, Character Study, Disillusionment, Gen, Masking, imposter syndrome meets actual imposter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-16 23:46:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28715226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soulshrapnel/pseuds/soulshrapnel
Summary: Padmé Amidala knows she has many different faces.So does Sheev Palpatine.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	Faces

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Taxxxon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taxxxon/gifts).



> I told Micelle I'd write her a story, and she asked for a story about the character parallels between Padmé and Palpatine (say that six times fast) so that's what I wrote! (This is only one of the parallels, really.)

Padmé has more than one face.

She discovers this as a very small child, playing with dresses and makeup as small children do. Seven years old, she gets into her mother's cosmetics box and tilts her head this way and that in the mirror, examining herself. Do the makeup one way, pose a certain way, and she looks like a princess from one of her favorite holovids. (It isn't just the makeup, she intuits quickly, it's an entire _aesthetic_ to which her whole body down to the smallest movements must commit.) Change a few details, make them softer and more subtle, and she looks older all of a sudden, a smaller version of her mother, whom she adores.

She plays like that for months, mostly alone but sometimes with a friend or three. She makes it her goal to see how many different kinds of people she can imitate - and she begins to think deeply about that, archetypes and personas and what it even means to be a kind of person. She is the kindly grocer's wife from the shop on the corner. She is a vulnerable little child who requires saving, a wise old apothecary, a warrior, a debutante, an ingenue, a wild eccentric, a humble laundrywoman, a girl wasting away from illness, a poet, a nurse. She is a wicked sorceress - something unnerves her about that one, and she washes it off quickly. She is a particular one of her classmates, down to the smallest detail, mimicking the way that particular girl steps and flicks her wrist.

When she is eight, she is picked for the Apprentice Legislature, and she says all the things that a thrilled young candidate is supposed to say. She _is_ thrilled. It's not a lie - it's just that she has to make sure she is seen being the right kind of person for that position, thrilled in the right way, so that her ideas will be taken seriously. At eight, she already understands this.

That night she goes to the fresher, washes everything completely off of herself, ties her hair back, and looks at her bare head and shoulders in the mirror. All the people she knows how to be are made of something, ways of putting on her makeup, ways of dressing, ways of moving, ways of speaking. What about when she isn't made of anything? What kind of person is Padmé then?

She isn't sure.

*

Sheev Palpatine has more than one face. At thirteen, when Padmé first meets him, she understands this. In her hometown, people didn't always understand Padmé's dual fixations - one on politics and justice, the other on appearance - but in Theed, everyone who matters loves both those things. Everyone here is always consciously choosing what kind of person they want to be.

It doesn't bother her that she can't get a read on him. Some people are open books, sincerity shining from them because it's never occurred to them to try being something they aren't. Some people have something big inside that they try to hide but can't, and that shows up in certain ways, with ill-timed smirks or frowns or sudden withdrawals, little mismatches between their face and their words. But in Theed, people are good at this game, whether their intentions are good or bad - too good to give themselves away like that. In Theed, most people are all surface, and you count yourself lucky if you ever get a glimpse underneath.

Popular holos about politicians make it sound like it's all a big game of sabacc, searching everyone's faces for those little tells, but Padmé judges people by simpler things. She assumes they're all wearing the face they think is best for their goals. And she looks at the results of those goals, concrete things. Is their advice sensible? Are their policies just or unjust? Are they loyal? Do their words line up right with the rest of what she knows?

When she is fourteen and becomes Queen Amidala, Senator Palpatine is one of the officials who formally calls her to congratulate her on her victory. She has already studied his record in the Senate - he seems to believe in the same things she does, fair and peaceful governance, cooperation between worlds. As her reign continues, she speaks with him often, gauging the galaxy's larger political climate and judging where Naboo fits in. Palpatine does not steer her wrong. His insights are subtle and useful, and he helps her to understand the intricacies of the emotional currents that guide groups of people, larger groups than Padmé has ever had to deal with before.

She knows that he works very hard to always look like a certain kind of person - grandfatherly, genial, trustworthy. It doesn't bother her any more than anyone else's public face. You have to start somewhere, in a place like Theed. You have to trust someone.

*

A Queen's face isn't meant to look like anyone else's. When she is thirteen, Padmé decides to have some fun with that.

She slips into the training sessions for her future handmaidens without telling them, at first, who she is. She makes herself look like the same kind of person as them: a noble-hearted young girl excited to serve the future queen. She likes this idea, slipping away into her own shadow and leaving her public face behind.

All of the handmaidens become Padmé's devoted friends. But her favorite is Sabé, the decoy, who looks so much like her already.

She and Sabé work together on Queen Amidala's face. There's not much room to be creative with the makeup - a Queen's makeup is a matter of tradition, but they both know a face is more than just that. They work together to decide how the Queen will speak, a slow and dignified voice in a lower register. They decide how she will move, what she will react to. They practice until they can both do it flawlessly.

Padmé isn't in love with Sabé, not the way people fall in love in storybooks, not the way she will be with Anakin later. But she has never been more intimate with someone than this. When she talks about Sabé to other people, she wants to say, _we shared a face_ \- the way people talk about sharing a bed or a home or an ordeal. But she doesn't say it. She doesn't think most people would understand.

*

"I will not defer," says Padmé when she is fourteen years old, staring down a room full of Senators. "I was not elected to watch my people suffer and die while you discuss this invasion in a committee."

It's the angriest she's ever been. She didn't have the luxury of rage like this when she was on Naboo, running from the Trade Federation's droids, marched along in chains. Then, she was compressed down to survival and necessity. Now she wants to grab all these pampered old people who know nothing about living through a planetary invasion and wring their necks. She feels her voice rising, even though Candidate Amidala campaigned on the premise that she was the most level-headed of the candidates, a voice of calm reason. She feels the slight accent she and Sabé developed thickening, of its own accord, almost to the point of parody.

But Palpatine is there at her side. He knows how this galactic game is played, and what kind of person wins it. She trusts him when he tells her what to do with her anger.

It isn't until a little later, when she finds out he's been nominated Chancellor in Valorum's place, that she feels the first small stirring of doubt. Even aside from how it benefits their planet, there was something in this for him.

Padmé knows what to do with this kind of doubt. It's not strange for a politician to be a little selfish this way; really, it's stranger when they aren't. She neither suppresses her thoughts nor acts on them rashly. She only notes the conflict of interest and files it away as a data point. Palpatine has never steered her wrong before. He claims that he'll use his new position to help Naboo, as well as other neglected worlds, far from the Core. She doesn't contradict him. She only resolves to look closely at the results he gets.

She does go back to Naboo, though, without him.

*

Padmé accumulates faces as she gets older. In her public life she becomes Senator Amidala, a softened and stripped-down version of the Queen. When the Jedi assign Anakin Skywalker as her bodyguard, she becomes a refugee for a while, and then she becomes something else, something that surprises her.

Anakin Skywalker has only two faces. There's the Jedi he thinks he should be, and there's a kind of traumatized rage, burning behind that first face at inopportune moments, sometimes breaking fully through. Padmé has more compassion for that second face than she should. She's twenty-four now, an age where most Nubians have settled down into family life for a while, but she remembers how it feels to be young and blazing with power, and to feel that no one is listening to you when you need them most.

Anakin seems to worship her, to crave her love in a way that she hasn't been craved before, and around him, she feels herself becoming the kind of person who can fall in love. She's practiced it before in the mirror, imitating how an ingenue would talk, how she would shyly glance up through her lashes. It's very different from politics. She shouldn't let it happen, but she likes how it feels. She likes _him._

She shrugs it off when Anakin talks about wanting a dictatorship, lets him pass it off as a joke. She comforts him on Tatooine when he's hunched over and crying, wearing that second face nakedly, telling her how he massacred a whole village. Anakin needs someone who can look him in that second face and love him, and that's the kind of person she wants to be.

He's a Jedi, after all. Sometimes when he looks at her, she thinks that he sees past all the faces, to some unknowable thing at the core of her.

*

When Padmé is twenty-four, Palpatine gives himself emergency powers to create an army, and just then, a fully-formed army appears, as if by magic. By this time, Padmé thinks she has figured out who he is. He wants power, and his faces are means to that end. It's not unusual. It _is_ disappointing.

She does believe in the war, though, at first. She was a pacifist once, and she doesn't want unnecessary violence, but she's seen what happens when military threats are ignored. She's seen Anakin maimed by the evil man who leads the Separatists. If the Republic is under attack, it should defend itself.

But a man like Palpatine never stops at only the necessary forms of defense.

For years, Padmé watches as the needs of peacetime are ignored, as money is misappropriated and power accumulates in the Supreme Chancellor's position. Civil liberties disappear one by one. That second face of Anakin's, tempered by war, only grows stronger and more disturbed.

Someone should do something, Padmé thinks - and she tries to. She finds like-minded allies in the Senate who don't like what's happening any more than she does. She makes speeches, passes motions, writes petitions. She helps found the Delegation of 2,000, all of them joining together to voice their concerns and demanding that Palpatine's emergency powers be revoked. He ignores them, of course. None of it feels like enough.

"Have you ever considered that we may be on the wrong side?" she asks Anakin, in private, when he starts to express doubts of his own about the Jedi, but of course he won't follow her that far. Palpatine's faces have always been more convincing to Anakin than hers, and she doesn't know how to make him understand.

A thing can call itself a democracy, a force for good in the galaxy, but that's just a face. Behind it, there can be something different.

A woman can call herself a good, wise, level-headed senator, someone who works tirelessly to restore the principles of democracy, but that's just a face, too. It can mean nothing. No democratic principles are restored. No one is saved.

*

One night, when Padmé is seventeen - when her term as queen is nearing its end, and she's staring down the daunting question of what she wants to do _next_ \- she turns to Sabé. The two of them have always shared a room and an evening ritual, washing their faces clean, brushing out their hair. Whichever one of them was Queen Amidala that evening, she's a creation that belongs to them both. Taking her apart, storing her for safekeeping, is a thing they do as a pair.

It's a thing they won't be doing much longer. Queen Amidala has had a good reign. She is one of the most popular queens her world has ever had. But this close to its end, she can't help but see the cracks in it. The places where she could have been more, done more, known more sooner.

"Who do I look like," she asks abruptly, "when I'm sleeping?"

Sabé looks back at her, intuiting what she means. She means when she's not wearing makeup or much of anything else. When she's not awake enough to make her body act like a particular kind of person's body.

"Someone good," says Sabé, grave and unhesitating.

Padmé lies awake, that night, and wonders if it's true.

*

"The attempt on my life has left me scarred," says Palpatine on his dais at the Senate chamber's peak, but Padmé knows it isn't true. It's too convenient, and too unbelievable - given what she knows of him now, given what she knows of the Jedi. Maybe there was a fight, maybe there were a lot of things, but the Jedi weren't the ones who wanted a coup today.

She is twenty-eight and pregnant and exhausted and afraid. For once in her life, she doesn't know what to do. None of her efforts, none of _two thousand_ senator's efforts, managed to stop this. She doesn't know what kind of person could fix it, when the whole rest of the Senate seems to have wanted it to happen all along.

The Senate was always full of such people. She should have known as much when she was fourteen. In that much, at least, Palpatine spoke the truth. The Republic called itself just and good and a democracy, but behind its face there was only money and power, and a few people like her, a few who were naive enough to think they could make it something else.

That's why she knows, when she looks at Palpatine's newly deformed face, exactly what it means. He moves differently now. He speaks in different tones. He visibly relishes the applause as he never has before. Palpatine has been becoming more and more like this, by inches, all the time she's known him, and now the transformation is complete.

She knows. This isn't a thing the Jedi did to him.

He's only taking his makeup off.


End file.
